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JavaScript language proposal: function implementation hiding (github.com/tc39)
3 points by tardismechanic on March 26, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 3 comments



I know there's valid uses but everytime JS ships something that isn't a first-class object, everytime it adds security & privacy, it makes me sad for the language.

To have been such a promising exciting open place, where we could ask the runtime anything & see everything... To go from such a blissful state to such a sad industrial world where we just lock down & restrict & control... I hate it. Industrial demands having their claws in computing is shit, & the industry doesn't deserve it's bad things.

But we certainly do see a lot of scary industrial systems spying on & surveilling others. Gross, & defense feels semi justifiable. (Albeit if this starts running in TPM/security enclaves & isn't ddvtools-ad then we can burn it all down & pitchfork some fucking villians).

Also WebAssembly is coming & isnt hidden code (you load the code itself into an address space before launching it I believe?) , but it's going to be vastly less understandable anyways. Making js also dead closed & worthless is parity!

I wish it wasn't like this. I still think "private" is a poison that is un-JS, & whatever merit it has is outweighed by far by it's badness. Almost no one needs it, we did great without it & with informat this. _foo. There are a couple real sensitive uses but mostly we'd be better with loose walls not higher ones. But the fear-based ideology features prominently in the computer-science psyche, and the looking down our noses at a language without hard protection won.

And now people don't reach for convention & lax awesome caveat emptor, we just write tons of stuff with private just because it's in the language and that is absolutely a worse state, is woefully sadder & narrower & more pathetic than where JS was. Awful sadness of letting fear win, of being desperate for control, it defeats us.


This is why I enjoy using emacs so much.


I don't like this. It's too useful to malicious developers relative to how useful it is for legitimate purposes.




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